The rooms looked like completely normal police-station offices. The only extravagance was a couple of banners on the walls, proclaiming the ‘World Police and Fire Games’. Quite a few policemen and -women had managed to tear themselves away from the stacks of unsolved cases piling up more and more uncontrollably in the country’s increasingly unmanned police stations. A familiar face or two slipped past; the trio nodded now and then, blurting out something amusing from time to time, saw Söderstedt talking to a few people, and saw Nyberg with a group to one side, coffee cups in hand: a thin, well-dressed man with a black ring of hair around his skull; a younger man with well-groomed hair and a small, black beard. And a short-haired woman that caused Jorge Chavez’s Latin heart to skip a beat.
They joined the end of the conversation. The thin man said to Nyberg: ‘Yup, the holiday starts in a couple of days. I’m going out to the cottage to recharge the batteries. Do you remember the cottage, Gunnar?’
Then their peace was shattered.
‘Paedophiles!’ Paul Hjelm shouted. ‘Are you having a coffee?’
‘We. Are. Not. Paedophiles,’ Gunnar Nyberg said emphatically, looming menacingly over the trio. Then he made introductions in all directions. It was utterly incomprehensible, so they took matters into their own hands.
‘Of course,’ exclaimed Kerstin Holm as she greeted the thin man with the bald head. ‘The Marathon Man! Where did you come this year?’
‘Ludvig Johnsson,’ the Marathon Man said politely. ‘I came ninety-sixth, my first time under a hundred. And you’re the miraculously resurrected A-Unit, I assume?’
‘Part of it,’ Holm nodded.
Hjelm greeted the younger man with the little beard, and gave a start when he said: ‘Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg.’
He didn’t look more than thirty. A superintendent younger than Chavez? Was that possible? Was this really Party-Ragge?
‘I tend to give the title to see people’s reactions. They’re often like that,’ Hellberg added, laughing, when he saw the reaction.
‘Sorry,’ said Hjelm. ‘I can normally keep a neutral face.’
‘That’s not exactly true,’ said Holm, giving him a furtive glance.
Hjelm started to wander deeper into excuse territory.
‘I knew that there was a Hellberg and that he was young, but we’ve never met before, so…’
‘Give up,’ Kerstin Holm whispered, and Hjelm gave up.
Chavez gave the considerably taller woman a kiss on her hand. She looked sceptically at him while Gunnar Nyberg said: ‘Don’t lick the lady’s hand, you ruffian.’
‘Sara Svenhagen,’ said the lady.
‘Jorge Chavez,’ said the ruffian, adding: ‘Svenhagen?’
‘That’s also a standard reaction,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Yep, Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen is my dad. Just so that’s out there.’
‘Unexpected quality from the chief technician’s gene pool,’ Chavez said clumsily.
‘Give up,’ Kerstin Holm whispered, which Chavez took as a hint to keep trying.
‘You don’t expect someone investigating paedophiles to look like this.’
At which point someone should have shown compassion and removed him from the stage, throwing him out of a side door. That didn’t happen, however. The conversation was already under way.
‘How come you recognised me?’ Ludvig Johnsson asked Kerstin Holm.
‘I’ve started running a bit myself,’ she said, receiving a surprised glance from Hjelm.
‘Are you getting anywhere with the Sickla Slaughter?’ Ragnar Hellberg asked Paul Hjelm. ‘It seems to be a real hornets’ nest.’
‘You could say that. We’ve started to close in on a few leads, but no arrests are imminent.’
‘Christ,’ said Hellberg. ‘You sound like a press release. And now you’re going to steal Gunnar from me, too.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘I’m struggling to tear myself away from all those nice web pages on the Internet.’
‘Gunnar working on a computer seems like a contradiction to me,’ said Hjelm. ‘He’s the most earthbound policeman I’ve ever worked with. He once wrote off a car by tackling it. With a bullet in his neck.’
‘He seems to have lots of strings to his bow,’ Ragnar Hellberg laughed.
Sara Svenhagen, meanwhile, had been left at the mercy of the strange Latino man. Her thoughts were elsewhere, and the terrible introduction had been followed by sluggish distraction. Not from his side, though. Quite the opposite. Through sheer hard work, he had eventually managed to find a common interest, the Internet, strangely enough, and suddenly they were the only ones left, giving one another tips on how to deal with JavaScript. He was also courting her ceaselessly. Swapping her firmly rooted coffee mug for a champagne glass, toasting her, looking at her attentively, giving her compliments of a kind she had never heard before, incredibly aware of her reactions. And the strange thing was that she started to feel seen. Really seen. Appreciated. Valued. Things were so distorted.
The Internet made her virtual, faint around the edges; paedophilia hardened her against erotic feelings, and so when she successfully cracked a complicated code, tracking down a paedophile all by herself, she had no one to tell. She had painted herself into a corner, cut off her hair, let herself be held back by a horrible nightmare. She had disappeared among the invisible. The only person who saw her was Gunnar Nyberg, but as nothing more than a shining light, she knew that. And now, suddenly, she was standing before this passionate little man who was looking at her non-stop, really looking at her in order to uncover her true feelings, and she just wanted to let her hair down, like young, single women sometimes did. Even though she had no hair to let down. She did it anyway. Allowed her cropped hair to flow. He seemed to be spellbound, enchanted by her very existence, and she liked it. She had to admit that she really did like it.
They stayed behind until the catering staff started circling them like hungry hyenas. They hadn’t even realised that they were the last to leave, that the party had ended long before, that the police station was as good as empty for the night. When they finally did realise, she heard herself asking: ‘Do you want to come for a cup of coffee?’
They kissed in the taxi on the way to Surbrunnsgatan, engaged in a spot of light petting in the stairwell, threw off their clothes in the entrance, made love in that utterly uninhibited way, starting in the hallway, continuing in the bedroom and finishing on the floor; starting over again somewhere else. When they came to their senses, they were in the kitchen. Neither of them knew how they had ended up there. The contents of the bin were strewn over the floor. Neither of them knew why.
Sara felt as though she had thrown the windows wide open, as though air was rushing into a vacuum, as though her short hair was blowing wildly in the intense breeze. She threw her arms around him, holding him tightly.
Jorge felt as though something had shifted. Sex was no longer the end of something: it could also be the beginning. This was a radical mental shift. He wondered what it meant. He lay, curled up in her arms. She had thrown her arms around him, and he lay curled up, with his cheek against her chest.
It was a fantastic feeling.
A feeling. A shared feeling.
An enormous void in their lives which had suddenly been filled in.
He was woken by the sun’s rays. Nature’s own alarm clock. Though, on closer inspection, they weren’t completely natural. They were being directed at him. By a crack in the blinds.
In the slanting light, she was a glorious outline. As though enveloped in a waterfall of light. He reached out for her. She came no closer. She was completely still, surrounded by light. Completely inaccessible.
Ah, he thought. A nightmare.
‘I’ve got something you should see,’ she said.